Jeff Arnold's West

Monday, January 21, 2019

I reviewed The
Last Sunset back in July 2010 but I watched it again yesterday and I’d like
to revise my opinions somewhat.

I’ve never been a great fan of the Westerns of Robert Aldrich
(left). He was involved in one capacity or another with eight or nine
(depending on your definition of a Western). One he directed was absolutely
outstanding. I am thinking of Ulzana’s Raid
with Burt Lancaster (one of Aldrich’s favorite actors). That was a superbly
written, directed and acted movie, a fine Western. I am also fond of The Ride Back, a film he produced,
directed by his sort-of protégé Allen Miner, a minor B-Western in many ways but
beautifully done, with William Conrad and Anthony Quinn both excellent. But,
for me anyway, that was all she wrote. Vera Cruz, a 1954 blockbuster which Aldrich directed and which was co-produced by
Lancaster, has its admirers but I am not one, despite its starring Gary Cooper
(and Lancaster). It’s an overblown farrago and actually, I think, rather cynical. Lancaster as a blue-eyed Bronco Apache
was less than convincing in Apache
the same year, a rather plodding picture. 4 for Texas, a Sinatra vehicle of 1963, was very bad indeed, junk, in fact, directed
and acted in a slapdash way and neither funny nor even properly Western. And
Aldrich’s last Western, The Frisco Kid,
was among the worst I have ever seen, toe-curlingly, embarrassingly awful.

The Last
Sunset, however, falls in the middle. It’s not dreadful
but it’s not all that good either, though it has its points.

It pairs Rock Hudson with Kirk Douglas. Not so
much Kirk, but Rock often did Westerns in harness with another big name, rather
than starring on his own. Bend of the River with James Stewart, Horizons West with Robert Ryan, The Undefeated
with John Wayne, Showdown with Dean
Martin, he ‘did’ co-stars. Hudson didn’t do that many Westerns (11, again
depending on your definition) but the ones he did were pretty good, and he was
directed in them by the likes of Anthony Mann (twice), Budd Boetticher (twice)
and Raoul Walsh (twice), as well as by Aldrich. He rode well, was good as a tough
guy and, I thought, convinced in the genre.

In this one that pistol wasn’t a Colt .45 but,
unusually for a gunman, a derringer (so you may imagine that earned the movie
another revolver from Jeff). It’s an unusual gun for a goody, or even for a
semi-goody as here, usually being reserved for louche gamblers, town crooks and
saloon women, though of course you can think of the odd exception – John Wayne
had one in Big Jake (it saved his
grandson) and even Marshal Randolph Scott got a villain with one in A Lawless Street, and you don’t get
goodier than that. Still, usually derringers were sneaky little pop guns, and
an odd choice for a gunslinger. Kirk explains in the dialogue that no handgun is accurate at
more than twenty feet anyway and a derringer packs a bigger slug. Mmm. I think
if two gunmen are facing off in a showdown at twenty feet, the one with a
derringer is going to be at a distinct disadvantage. There used to be a video
on YouTube, since removed I think, in which an expert hit a target with only
one of the two shots at 15 yards, and (just) hit twice at seven yards. Still,
it makes a change. When Kirk does finally face off with Rock and his Colt .45, it’s
the Colt that wins, though for a particular reason. Douglas went for a slinky look-at-me
all-black costume that hovers on the brink of silly.

Gunfighter with a derringer

Aldrich hit it off with Hudson, finding him
professional and unselfish, but the Aldrich/Douglas relationship on the set was
less harmonious. The picture was a Bryna Productions one. Bryna (named for Douglas’s mother) was Kirk’s
company. He had set it up in 1955, inspired by the success of Burt Lancaster in
moving into production. So Douglas felt proprietary towards the picture and
that Aldrich was his employee. This didn’t go down well with Aldrich.

Producer, cinematographer, director - all was not sweetness and light

Dorothy Malone was the leading lady. I have a
real soft spot for Ms. Malone (who died last year, aged 93). I thought she was
beautiful and very good in Westerns. I would mention specially Colorado Territory with Joel McCrea
(Walsh again), The Nevadan and Tall Man Ridingwith Randolph Scott, Jack Slade with Mark Stevens (she saved
Jack with a derringer in that one), The Lone Gun with George Montgomery, At Gunpointand Quantez with Fred
MacMurray, and Warlock with Widmark,
Quinn and Fonda – it’s a pretty impressive list. In The Last Sunset she plays an ex-flame of Kirk’s who falls for Rock.
Once her hubby is dead, anyway. Lauren Bacall apparently turned down the role,
disliking the subject matter (see below under daring).

Always excellent, good here too

The husband was Joseph Cotten, poor as ever
(he was only good in one Western -Two Flags West) and in this one he plays a drunk, an ex-Confederate office who
ran away at Fredericksburg. He is shot to death in a squalid cantina, freeing
up Dorothy to get lovey-dovey with Rock and improving the picture by being
written out mid-way. I’m being unkind. He wasn’t that bad. He just seems to
overact. He would overdo the drunk again as Major Reno in The Great Sioux Massacre a few years later. Actually, I think it’s hard
to play a drunk convincingly in a movie. Thomas Mitchell did it well (and quite
often) but then he was a recovering alcoholic. IMDb tells us that Cotten
brought all his own food and water from the States to the shoot in Mexico, but it
was to no avail. He was the first of the film crew to fall sick.

Cotten rotten

Also in the cast is the young Carol Lynley as
Malone’s daughter. She looks a lot like her ‘mother’, in fact. She is supposed
to be fifteen, a girl on the threshold of womanhood, and she does it rather
well (she was in fact 17). This part of the plot is rather daring because she
falls for the dashing gunman in black (Douglas). He at first treats her as a
little girl but comes to reciprocate her passion. The film wasn’t risqué enough
to have the couple consummate their desire (it was made in 1959 Hollywood after
all) but they do kiss, then there are oblique references to suggest more. We
are on the very verge of creepy here. Of course it turns out that the girl is
his daughter (she manages to look also vaguely like him) and this shocks Kirk’s
character to the core, as it would, of course. The picture was also known as El Perdido. In some ways this is more of
a family tragedy than a Western.

Neither knows but…

Pretty little girl in a yellow dress

And further down the cast list we have the joy
of spotting Neville Brand and Jack Elam as cowhand/crooks, and the excellent
Jackboy as Jackboy, the dog. I also rather liked Margarito Luna and José Torvay
as the Mexican ranch hands (rather disgracefully uncredited). They had an
almost Greek-chorus role. They could sing a sight better than Kirk, too.

Excellent bad guys

So the cast is pretty strong.

It’s a good-looking picture, with nice Eastman
Color photography of attractive Sonora and Durango locations (most of the
picture is set in Mexico) by Ernest Laszlo, whom Aldrich used on four of his
Westerns.

The music, by Ernest Gold, is also well done.
The main theme was by Dimitri Tiomkin and the variations on Pretty Little Girl in the Yellow Dress are
often delightful.

The screenplay was by Dalton Trumbo, who had
the best name in the world (Dalton Trumbo) and worked quite a lot with Kirk,
notably on Spartacus, and he also did
Kirk's superb contemporary Western Lonely Are the Brave. For The Last Sunset he used a 1957 pulp novel by Vechel Howard, aka Howard Rigsby, Sundown at Crazy
Horse (the plot climaxes in Crazy Horse, Texas, on
the Rio Grande).

The source novel

The story is not the most plausible, it must be said, but they
kinda get away with it. Trumbo was simultaneously working on Exodus for Otto Preminger so may have
been a bit distracted.

Dalton Trumbo

Briefly, Brendan O'Malley (Douglas) arrives at
the Breckinridge ranch (Cotten's Mr. Breckinridge is away) and tries to rekindle the flame with Belle Breckenridge (Malone), but she will have
none of it. Is there a hint of The Searchers as O'Malley rides up to the dusty home? A mysterious stranger is
following and closing in on him. It’s Texas lawman Dana Stribling (Hudson). Kirk killed his younger sis’s
husband, and then the woman committed suicide, so Rock has an axe to grind.
O'Malley and Stribling are both alpha males and we know right away that a showdown is inevitable.
They are both good with their respective guns. Douglas is the charismatic rogue
playing against Hudson’s very straight good guy.

But they both agree to take Cotten’s herd up
to Texas (this is another rather improbable bit) and delay their moment of
truth till they get to Texas. So it becomes a cattle-drive Western, and I must
say the cattle shots aren’t at all bad – they had a decent number of steers. On
the way, the obligatory dangers occur: you know, Indians, dust storms, rustlers,
stampede, etc. You can’t have a cattle-drive picture without those. Kirk sings
round the campfire. Rock doesn’t.

At one point Stribling is stuck in quicksand but
O'Malley can’t let him die, even though he’s going to try to kill him later. It
would be against the Western code. Stribling's poor horse is a goner, though.

When the cowhands mutiny and threaten to sell the
women to the Dutchman in Vera Cruz, O'Malley saves the girl (enhancing her love for
him still further) while Stribling saves Belle. O'Malley is jealous but he can’t
prevent it: Stribling and Belle are falling in lerve.

They cross the Rio Grande into Texas

Arriving at the Rio Grande, they decided to
have a fiesta and in a key scene the daughter appears in her mother’s yellow
dress, and indeed looks very beautiful and very womanly.

But now they are at the end of the drive, so
Stribling tells O'Malley, “I’ll come for you at sundown.” Showdowns had to be at certain
dramatic moments of the day, dawn, noon, sundown, etc., although the other day we reviewed a
picture, Texas Lady, which had the gunfight
at high 4 pm. Perhaps Aldrich should have called the picture The Last Sundown. At any rate he makes much of the symbolic going
down of the sun, although the showdown was actually shot with the sun high, confusingly. Talking of titles, it is said that Universal considered the
hilariously bad The Magnificent Two, The
Majestic Brutes and Seething Guns.
The final choice was good, though.

Naturally, Belle tries to persuade her amour(s)
not to fight. She’d read The Virginian.
But equally naturally, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. The showdown
slightly foreshadows Once Upon a Time in the Westas the protagonists tensely circle to the strains of electric guitar,
though of course it is not taken to such extreme lengths (Leone favored the ad absurdam approach). Actually, Aldrich
worked with Leone on Sodom and Gomorrah and
the Italian greatly admired the American.

This picture has its flaws. But it also has
its string points. It was by no means the worst Western of Aldrich, Hudson or
Douglas. Aldrich called the filming "an extremely unpleasant
experience", and claimed that the script needed more work. He added, “It
all started badly, continued badly and ended badly. Kirk Douglas was
impossible.” But it isn’t that bad. Though it came out in the post-Magnificent Seven early 1960s, it was
shot in ’59 and in fact is in many ways a 50s Western, though it has modern
cinematic touches. Occasionally clichéd, it is also often interesting and
different.

Saturday, January 19, 2019

Regular readers of this blog, both of
them, will know that I am not a fan of the spaghetti western. It’s odd in a way
because I lived in Italy for twelve years. I love Italy and love the Western. But
I do not like 60s Italian Westerns – or westerns as I call them, for they are,
to me, not proper Westerns but more films about
the Western. My chief grudges against them are the atrocious dubbing, the
juvenile dialogue, the jangly music, the unconvincing costumes, the wrong
terrain and the poor acting. Otherwise they are OK I guess.

This one, which has the onscreen title 32 CALIBER
KILLER, is quite typical. It was directed by Alfonso Brescia, billed as Al
Bradley (cast and crew often took American-sounding names) who had come, as
many spaghetti-western people did, from the cheap rip-off sword-and-sandal
movies that were popular before the westerns started, in the mid-60s. He
directed seven westerns, two of them with Peter Lee Lawrence.

Quite a classic spag poster

Lawrence (Karl Hyrenbach) was a German
who died aged only 30 of a brain disease. He was blond and handsome but honestly,
not much of an actor, at least to judge by this dubbed spaghetti (it’s often
hard to tell). He had started with a small part in For a Few Dollars More. He plays a hired killer named Silver – Mr. Silver, as he usually insists - who favors a .32. He is
one of those supermen who is a trick shot and invincible with his fists and
very clever at sussing out who the villains are, and altogether indestructible,
so there is no suspense whatsoever.

Herr Hyrenbach

Second-billed was Agnès Spaak, from
Paris, as the saloon woman Betty, who is, I think, supposed to be enigmatic but
is actually just rather dull.

There’s the ‘other woman’, Janet (Lucy
Skay, don’t know anything about her). And there’s a youth, even more youthful
than the hero, Spot (Alberto Dell’Acqua, in the fourth of his 23 spaghetti westerns)
and he attaches himself to the hero as a kind of apprentice.

It starts with a stagecoach being held
up. One passenger stupidly pulls down the mask of the leader of the bandits and
recognizes him, so all the passengers are shot to death. Silver (sorry, Mr. Silver)
is hired by the bank boss Averell (Andrey Bosic, from Yugoslavia, as it was called then) to find the
robbers and kill them all. Averell discards the possibility of using the "John Pinkerton Agency" (sic), preferring to hire a murderer instead.

Of course he's unbeatable at cards. He's unbeatable period.

One by one the robbers are killed off
but who is the Mr. Big? Well, it’s blindingly obvious that it’s either Averell himself
or gambler Ramirez (Gregory West), or the sheriff (Mirko Ellis, born Mirko Korcinsky,
a Swiss). It duly turns out to be one of them. As if we care.

One good thing: it’s a two-derringer
picture. Both Ramirez and the saloon dame have one.

The costumes are lousy. The lawmen wear stars that look as though they came off the Christmas tree.

There's the usual semi-comic saloon brawl

It’s supposed to be Carson City. It’s
Spain.

Admirers of spaghettis will enjoy the
opening titles. They are quite classic, with cartoon-like figures and shouted
ho-ha ‘music’.

It’s quite Italian because Betty is
handed a note reading DEVO PARLARTI (I have to speak to you), and the final song is in Italian. The sets
are cheap and clumsy. What is supposed to be a Southern Pacific railroad site
is labeled SOUTH PACIFIC. They got the wrong movie there.

It’s junk. But spag fans may like it. I thought I better watch it. I force myself to sit through a spaghetti every now and then, partly out of masochism (it's lovely when it stops) and partly vaguely wondering if I might one day find one that was half good. Not this one, that's for sure.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Back in July last year a new Western was
released, a Smith Brothers Films production directed by the Smith brothers,
written by the Smith brothers and starring two Smith brothers. A Smith brother
was cinematographer, another wrote the music and another still was the editor. I
guessed therefore that the Smith family had something to do with the picture
and I was curious to know more. In fact I was invited to do a
distance-interview but sadly, though I had a list of brilliant and pertinent
questions (hem hem), the Smiths never got back to me with illuminating answers, so I
can’t pass on fascinating insights about the making of the film to you, dear
e-reader. Still, I did watch it (they kindly gave me access) and I thought it
might be worth posting a comment or two on it. You might come across it and wonder
if it’s any good. And obviously your first instinct will be to look it up on Jeff Arnold's West.

It’s an early Western about trappers, with
a sort of Jeremiah Johnson vibe. Shot
in stunning Idaho and Wyoming locations in winter, it captures very well the harsh
beauty and real danger of the 1850s frontier. There was a time when Westerns
had to be filmed in Mexico or Alberta to avoid power lines and contrails but
the Smiths manage very well in Idaho to convey the huge and forbidding
emptiness of the mid-nineteenth century frontier.

Orphans Abel and Henry Iron are struggling to make a living in a world of ever-scarcer
beaver and declining demand for pelts. Apart from their financial difficulties, they
have to face a brutal winter in a rough cabin and dangerous Native American
hostility. Henry, the younger brother, would like to try California and the
goldfields, but Abel is more for sticking it out.

Stay or go?

However, in the words of the (rather
anachronistic) script, “things escalate”. (The first known use of escalate is 1944 and I doubt anyone used
it much before Vietnam.) Pedantry aside, though, things do escalate. Abel shoots
an Indian and runs from another, while Henry, thinking he is being cheated by a
dealer, resorts to his gun and as a result loses the brothers’ only horse. “I’m sorry, Lily,”
he rather pathetically tells the dying animal.

So now the brothers have three enemies:
bad guys, Indians and the nature. These are of course the classic foes of
Western heroes, and you do get the sense that the fraternal Smiths like and try to
respect the genre. Various Western tropes are employed: it builds to a final
showdown, the brothers want to go to California to start anew, Henry is kind to
his horse in the first reel (though I don’t think movies have reels these days)
to signify that he is a goody, and so on. You get the idea that the Smiths have
seen a Western or two before. That’s good, though.

The two decide, reluctantly, to face the
Western winter rather than wait in their cabin for the inevitable attack, so
they take a minimum of equipment and leave.

Homespun philosophy

It is true that life on the wild
frontier must have often been tedious and uneventful, and also that danger,
when it came, would arrive unexpectedly. Thus, long stretches of quiet inaction
onscreen punctuated by sudden flurries of violence do have a justification. This
pattern also contributes to building atmosphere and our marveling at natural
beauty. Still, the Smiths were making a commercial movie and as a viewer you do
ask yourself if there is really enough plot for the 92 minutes’ runtime. The movie isn't fast-paced.

For most of the film the brothers are
the only ones who speak – if you discount the war-cries of the Indians. So a
lot of importance is placed on their lines and I’m not entirely sure the script
can bear the weight. There’s a fair bit of pretty homespun philosophy in the
brothers’ talk. If the fraternal relationship had developed in some way it
might have been better but you get the impression that the brothers already
know and understand each other utterly, and little changes in that regard.

They trek

The appearance of old mountain man
Jethro (Richard Dean, entertaining) is a welcome relief, though. He trades them
coffee for victuals and company but is caught trying to steal the coffee back
in the night, which leads to shootin’. Later Jethro will signal danger to us in
another way.

There’s guitar music. The score is
minimalist, but it works, complementing the desolate landscape.

They wear no hats, curiously.

The fighting is not stylized or balletic.
There are undignified scuffles rather than choreographed stunt work. The word authentic springs inevitably to mind.

The finale is certainly packed with
Western action, as we get a brothers/Indians showdown. Dramatically, I think
the bad guys ought to have been brought back in but they are written out
altogether after the initial fight with Henry.

Two of the Smith brothers, Tate and Josh, co-directors and co-writers,

are interviewed (though not by Jeff)

All in all I thought this was a pretty
good film. It would certainly repay a look if you get the chance. Though
visually just about on a par with The Revenant and sharing some plot similarities, notably surviving the harsh
terrain, it doesn’t have the quality of that picture, but still, it does have
its points.

The acting of the two brothers, by the
two brothers, is very good. It had to be - the film would have failed otherwise
– but it is impressively done by Tate (Abel) and Porter (Henry), in their debuts, as far as I
know. That, the convincing flurries of action and the almost National
Geographic quality of the scenes make this a picture worth seeing. It’s
original enough to stand on its own feet and I reckon the Smith family deserves
considerable credit.

Sunday, January 13, 2019

The famous Hollywood actress Claudette
Colbert (left), one of the top celebs of her time, who in the 1930s had starred in comedy-romances such as It Happened One Night (for which she won an
Oscar) and Midnight, didn’t do
Westerns. They weren’t her thing. She was cast for John Ford in the eighteenth-century
drama Drums Along the Mohawkin 1939, if you
call that a Western. In fact she got top billing in it, even though she was
unconvincing as Henry Fonda’s frontier wife and her acting was very
old-fashioned. Colbert also returned as co-star to Clark Gable (the male lead
in It Happened One Night) in Boom Town in 1940, a drama-romance about
wildcatters (Gable and Spencer Tracy) becoming oil tycoons and loving the same
woman (la Colbert) but I wouldn’t call that a Western either. No, in reality, Texas Lady was the only true Western she
made. Perhaps she thought the genre beneath her, I don’t know. But in any case she wasn't terribly suited to it.

Texas
Lady was a proper Western, though, and it has
certain points in its favor – though also some weaknesses. It was directed (his
last film) by Tim Whelan, The Thief of
Baghdad chap, who also didn’t really do Westerns, though he helmed two perfectly
satisfactory Randolph Scott oaters, Badman’s Territory in 1946 and Rage at Dawn the same year as Texas Lady, both also for RKO.

Director Whelan (Alamy photo)

The writer was Horace McCoy, who worked
on twelve big-screen Westerns, including the very fine The Lusty Men. It was a Nat Holt production. We might fairly call
Holt a Western specialist. He did a lot of Randolph Scott oaters, including Rage at Dawn with Whelan and McCoy.

Horace was at the typewriter

Producer Nat Holt on the set of another picture, with Ann Jeffreys

There are some nice Columbia State
Historic Park locations shot in ‘SuperScope’ and Technicolor by the great Ray Rennahan,
and some chirpy (though occasionally slushy) music by Paul Sawtell.

We open in 1885 with Barry Sullivan well
cast as a smooth riverboat gambler being taken to the cleaners by a superior
poker player. He is not worried about losing the fifty grand, just the damage
to his reputation. This is because the winning gambler is a woman (it’s
Claudette, of course). It turns out that the very competent card player has
been in training for years, specifically in order to clean Barry out. You see,
her pa had embezzled fifty thousand dollars from the bank where he worked, lost
it all to Barry at cards and then committed suicide. So she was out for
revenge. She gets it, but still, you can sense an attraction of one gambler to
the other.

He loses

Well, Prudence (Colbert’s character is
named Prudence) pays off her dead daddy’s debt and then sets off for darkest
Texas where she intends to take charge of the only asset her late pa left her,
a small-town newspaper, The Fort Ralston Clarion.

Unfortunately, the managing editor, Clay
Ballard (our old pal Douglas Fowley) refuses to accept the ownership document
and is generally surly. He is anyway in the pocket of the two local rich men
who run the whole place. Mica Ralston and his partner Whit Sturdy founded the town,
driving out the Indians and taking over the land, two million acres of it. They
are classic ruthless rancher types, and will have no truck with a woman (a
woman, indeed!) running a paper and maybe criticizing them for being
overbearing. Ralston is played by Ray Collins and Sturdy by Walter Sande, two
regulars of our beloved genre. Sande’s character is a bit on the bland side,
and he is overshadowed by Collins’s Ralston, who takes ruthlessness to quite
some lengths. Collins was good in this, I thought.

The ranchers have a hired gun, an
illiterate thug who nevertheless wears a deputy’s badge, Jess Foley, played by Gregory
Walcott (right), a square-jawed former Warners contract player who did a lot of TV
Westerns but who started big-screen oaters in ’55 with this picture and another
lady-in-town one, Strange Lady in Town
with Greer Garson. The thing is, Deputy Foley and the would-be newspaperlady
Prudence are supposed to feel a mutual electricity, a sort of fatal attraction.
Alright, but even Barry Sullivan, whom she had semi-romanced in the first reel
(but who has been written out of all the middle part of the movie), was nine years
her junior. OK, true love knows no age and all that. But Walcott was
almost young enough to be Colbert’s grandson and this part is implausible, if
not even slightly creepy. Walcott himself said, “I had done so many great films
and worked with so many great directors that I didn’t want to be identified
with such a piece of trash.” That was perhaps a bit harsh but he was right that
his part in the movie was not terribly convincing.

Prudence gradually manages to win over
the townsfolk to her side, aided by a broken-down alcoholic lawyer whom she
reforms and who acts for her (James Bell) and the saloon owner, who is,
unusually for Westerns, a goody (our chum John Litel), and, especially, by
gambler Barry when he turns up. Of course deputy Foley is very jealous of the
gambler, and being a hired gun, vows to kill him. There is to be a classic Main
Street showdown, though at the rather unhabitual hour of four p.m. (we are
rather more used to dawn, noon, sundown, etc.) Are you ready for the good news?
You might have guessed it already. Barry defeats the gunslinger, wounding him
and sending him off with his tail between his legs, with a derringer! Not only
that, one of those sleeve types that you can dash into you palm because it’s on
a spring. Well, that certainly sent the film up in my estimation.

Saloon owner Litel is a goody

There’s another good bit when the widow
in black (Celia Lovsky, below) of a homesteader that the deputy murdered goes to visit
the gunman, with a shotgun.

Widow v. gunslinger

There’s a ‘fandango’ at the local
saloon, the Wigwam. So that’s good too.

In this one the railroad is a symbol of
progress and a force for good. Once she gets control of her newspaper, Editor
Prudence campaigns for one, while the old-style ranchers are dead set against
the idea. You’d think they’d be in favor, for getting their cattle to market,
but no. We are so used to railroads being the very exemplar of corporate greed,
riding roughshod over the rights of decent homesteaders, that it comes as
rather a refreshing change to see them portrayed as goodies.

"Such a piece of trash." Maybe a bit harsh.

Well, spurred on by the power of the
popular press the people rise up, kick out the ranchers’ corrupt officers and
elect a new judge, mayor and sheriff. Will ‘the people’ win out over the
tyrannical bosses, and succeed in bringing ‘progress’ to the West? Of course
they will, assisted by a couple of Texas Rangers who turn up in the last reel
to being some law ‘n’ order, to whom the ruthless ranchers rather surprisingly meekly
and suddenly bow.

To be brutally frank (and when, dear
e-readers, is your Jeff anything less?) Texas
Lady was not the best Western to come out in the mid-1950s. The late Brian Garfield summed it up pithily as “Predictable, rambling, slow.” And I think Ms.
Colbert was probably right to eschew the genre. Poster slogans like WOMANLY
WILES WERE HER WEAPONS! and A LADY TILL THE FIGHTING STARTED, THEN WHAT A
WOMAN! sound a bit outdated these days. Still, it does have its plus points
here and there. I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand, e-pards. You could give it a
go.